And if someone disagrees with you on my lj, they'd likely be disagreeing with me too, so your being gone wouldn't prevent it.

But this is probably not the time for it in your life; I will miss you while you're gone but I realize you're busy and have other things on your mind.

My thoughts are with you. I know what it's like to lose a loved one. May the coming hours and days bring you only as much turbulence as will be helpful. And feel free to either seek it out or avoid it in whatever way suits you best, including reading or avoiding my lj.

I don't expect to fight with you at all, but I've just backed off over a fight with one of your commentators about Richard Dawkins, who has been one of my heroes since the early 1970s, when I first read The Selfish Gene. I won't say it triggered my interest in evolutionary biology (that had been done at school), but it certainly started me on the path of reading closely and extensively about it.

As I videod Dawkins' appearances on TV over 30 years (I just salvaged the Dimbleby lecture which became the essay Unweaving the Rainbow on VHS tape) I am very aware of both his lecture style and his debating style, and the "shrill and aggressive" accusations annoy me exceedingly.